Batista Unleashed (5 page)

Today, if you look at my rap sheet, you’ll see I was convicted for possessing drug paraphernalia, which is a misdemeanor. I’m not making light of it—those were terrible, stupid things to do, and no one should ever, ever follow my example.

DRUGS AND PARANOIA

People hear about a drug conviction and they automatically think, Oh, that person did a lot of drugs. But in my case, I never really did a lot of drugs. I’ve just never really been into that.

Smoking weed or marijuana always made me paranoid. I really hate that feeling. One time Ben asked me to hold some stuff for him.

I was home by myself and bored as hell, so I smoked some weed. Then I got paranoid. I was looking out the window every ten minutes, I was so afraid someone was watching me. I moved Ben’s stuff about fifty times, going through the house all night. That’s what I did, in between eating a gallon of ice cream and a pot of chili.

And while there have certainly been a good number of exceptions, for the most part I’m not even much of a drinker. To this day, I drink here and there when I go out, but not all that much. At home, I rarely drink at all. I’ve just never enjoyed it all that much.

ASSAULT CASE DROPPED

I was charged with assault one other time, but those charges were also dropped.

It was another instance involving a friend of mine named Chris. We were at a shopping mall, and Chris wanted to get his ear pierced, but he didn’t have any money. So we went up to this kid who was the younger brother of this girl we knew, and started picking on him a little. We told him to give Chris some money so he could get his ear pierced. The kid was kind of scared. He said he didn’t have any money, but that he had some at home.

Chris didn’t want him riding in the car, so we stuffed him in the trunk of his car. It seemed funny at the time, but it was awful. Chris was really hitting this kid a lot. He threw steak knives at his feet, then stole some jewelry from the kid’s house.

The police investigated and arrested both of us. I didn’t know Chris stole the jewelry at the time—he didn’t tell me until later on. He ended up giving all the jewelry back and they dropped the charges.

It seemed funny at the time, but as I’m writing this I realize it sounds horrible: stuffing a kid in the trunk of a car, beating him up, and stealing his mom’s jewelry.

Jesus Christ, what was I thinking?

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By the time I get to Carbondale, touch up my tan, and grab something to eat, it’s after five and I’m running late. It’s still winter and it’s pretty dark; the end of town where the college arena is located seems deserted. I spend a few minutes circling around the campus, looking for the building and then trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go. Finally I see our
SmackDown!
truck parked near the building.

When we do a live television show, we need a whole fleet of trucks to carry everything we use—the ring, set, lights, television cameras, and whatnot. We have a small army of production people who come in and set up, do the show, and strip it back down. But house shows—wrestling events that aren’t televised—are different.
SmackDown! house shows
have one semitrailer that carries all the equipment. It’s a tight squeeze, but they get it all in.

WWE is one company with three different “brands” of wrestling, each centered around a television show:
Raw,

SmackDown! and ECW. (At
the time that I’m writing this, ECW is traveling with
SmackDown! and we tape our shows
together.)

The weekly television shows are actually just a small part of a wrestler’s schedule. In a typical week,
SmackDown!
might do three house shows—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—and then the TV show Tuesday. The last day is always television day; it tends to be longer and more intense than the others. After that, we get a travel day and then maybe two days off. But a lot of us have appearances on those off days and other commitments that soak up the time. And we’re on the road just about every week of the year, not just in America but in Europe and Asia as well.

When I finally find the right parking lot, Todd, who’s head of security for the show, directs me to a good parking spot near the door. Todd’s a good guy; he and his brother Jimmy watch out for us before and after the show, making sure that we’re not bothered and that things stay calm. They’re really nice guys, though I wouldn’t screw with them if I were you.

I really depend on the security guys a lot. One of my closest friends on the road was one of our security coordinators, Jimmy Noonan. He’s not with us anymore, unfortunately, but I really enjoyed working and traveling with him. I don’t have any great stories about Jimmy, but he was always saying something funny, cracking me up. He’s just a typical New York wiseass. He could be grouchy in a funny way. We got close on the road and I really felt like I trusted myself in his hands.

Inside, the crew has already set up the ring. Our producer, John Law, has a small table near one of the stands. He’ll work the sound system from there, cuing the intros and the incidental music. Right now he’s briefing the locals who will handle the spotlights, telling them what to do and mostly trying to get them to relax. There are two spots tonight, and they’re not going to have to do anything real fancy—just follow us out to the ring.

The show is being held at the Southern Illinois University Arena, a basketball gymnasium that fits about ten thousand people and dates to the early sixties. It’s plain and a little dated—the school has plans for a new arena. But its small size gets the fans real close; it’s one of those places where you can sense the crowd from the moment you step out of the dressing room…

Things started to turn around for me the year I was put on probation. It didn’t happen all at once, and it wasn’t really because I was on probation.

The big thing was: I became a father.

LIFTING

I started lifting weights probably when I was seventeen years old. My dad had weights around the house and I just started getting into it. I was a skinny kid, tall but skinny. I remember being teased because I was so vascular, really veiny. You could see all my blood vessels on my arms, my chest, my neck, everywhere. Once I started lifting, that turned out to be a good thing.

I found my way to a gym called the Olympus Gym in Falls Church, Virginia. It was a hard-core gym and there were a lot of meatheads hanging out there. Until I walked into that gym, I really had no clue what bodybuilding entailed, or what power lifting was all about. They got me into power lifting and helped me get serious about my body. Once that happened, I really filled out. Lifting—I just took to it like a fish to water. I needed something in my life and that was it.

My body really responded. It just blew up. I’d grown taller for so many years that I never had a chance to fill out. Now that was all I did.

At the time of my senior year in high school, I think I was six five. But I weighed maybe—maybe—two hundred pounds. That’s actually very thin for that height. But within a short time of training, I probably put on a good fifty pounds of solid weight.

The people at the gym offered me a job and I grabbed it. It was my first real job out of high school. I worked at the front desk. People would come in and I would show them how to use the machines, the weights, whatever they were working with. I’d do some other odd jobs, helping out here and there. Nowadays, most people working with customers in a gym have to be certified, but back then it wasn’t such a big deal. You just had to know what you were doing.

GLENDA

Weight lifting and my job at the gym helped me turn things around in my life. It was like therapy for me, letting me work out my aggressions and also giving me a place to belong. But the real catalyst was the birth of my daughter, Keilani. I realized I had to be a father, I had to provide for her. I started working as a bouncer and picking up whatever income I could.

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Keilani is almost four here.

And I loved that girl. I still do. I love both my girls.

I started going out with their mom, Glenda, somewhere toward the latter half of 1989. I’d recently broken up with the girl who’d been my steady girlfriend for many years. I had no real direction and a lot of the people who knew me, including the family I was staying with, were fed up with me. They thought I was a bum and not doing anything with my life. They were getting ready to throw me out, that’s how disgusted they were.

I’d been going to school with Glenda but didn’t really know her that well. We started dating that summer. She had a steady job and was still living with her family. When the family I’d been staying with finally got tired of me, Glenda gave me a place to stay and helped me out of that bad situation. I became really dependent on her.

We were together for what seemed like all of two weeks when she got pregnant. And I don’t know, it’s been a nightmare ever since. I can’t even tell you half the stuff she’s done. She’s made my life more than a living hell.

THE GOOD STUFF: MY KIDS

We got married. Things weren’t completely horrible at first. Glenda kept her job. I started working more at the gym and later on got jobs as a bouncer at bars. A lot of times during the day I’d be home watching the baby. It was great. I would put my daughter in the stroller and take her into the gym with me. It’d be like five in the morning, and we’d be working out together.

My second daughter, Athena, was born about two years later. By that time there was really no hope for the marriage.

What happened?

Glenda does things that end up being very destructive to everyone around her. There’s no other way to put it. My daughters are the only good thing that came out of that relationship; there’s no doubt about that.

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Athena.

Years after we divorced, things got so bad with my ex-wife that I ended up being awarded custody of my girls. It took a long court struggle; I’ll talk about it later. But I don’t want there to be any doubt about one thing: I’ve never regretted having my kids. I’ve really struggled to stay in their lives at different times. I’ve had a rocky relationship with my older daughter over the past few years, but I’ve never regretted having her or fighting for her and her sister, even though I don’t consider their mother a significant part of my life.

BOUNCING

When I first started working as a bouncer, it looked like easy money. I had a lot of friends who were doing it. It was kind of a cool job to go and stand in a club or a bar and look big. Every so often you’d throw people out. It wasn’t very hard work but you’d get paid decently for it. I could work at night, make a few bucks, and then go to the gym during the day. Sometimes I’d get off work and go right to the gym and work out. This would be three or four in the morning, and because the owner had given me a key, I’d have the run of the place.

Checking IDs and looking tough wasn’t the only thing I did. Over the years, I had to put the hurt on a lot of people. Professionally, of course.

My first really big job was at a pretty popular bar called Lulu’s. A friend of mine named Chris Meighan got a job there as the club manager. I was working at another club, but he offered me a sweet deal to come over and be a bouncer for him. I can’t remember how much money it was at the time, but it was really good. They had a restaurant connected to the bar, so there was free food, too. The hours were good, the pay was good, and the people I worked with were good.

Most of the staff there were Sig Eps—members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity—who had gone to Radford University in Virginia and knew Chris. As a matter of fact, I’d go down to party at the fraternity every so often. Another friend of ours, Mike Connor, would take me along. He was a Sig Ep and also a bodybuilder, a typical meathead.

Not really, though. Because he was mathematically inclined, making him an intellectual meathead. But a great guy and a great partier.

The parties always seemed to end up with drunken fights. One night I had to haul ass because I got pretty drunk and got into a bad fight. I thought I was going to be arrested. I never found out if I did serious damage to this one kid, but I clocked him and knocked him out. I’m pretty sure I broke his jaw.

Lulu’s was very big not only with the college crowd but with the military crowd as well. Now, those two groups don’t really mix that well to begin with, so you throw some alcohol into the mix and there can be more than a few problems.

We probably had the biggest bouncing staff in the city, both in numbers and size—a real bunch of meatheads, and I say that with affection. We were constantly tossing people out the door, trying to head off trouble. I’ve worked at clubs where all the bouncers were just straight thugs. A lot of these guys would pick fights with people just so they could throw them out. Worse: they’d throw them out the back and then rob them. But that wasn’t the case at Lulu’s. The bouncers—we weren’t politically correct enough to call ourselves “security”—really tried to be peacemakers and do a professional job. The cops, though, had a lot of personal problems with the bouncing staff, and they were always looking to arrest somebody. Maybe we were tossing their friends out, whatever. And I have to confess, we weren’t the most humble guys about it.

I got arrested a few times while I was working there because of some of the fights I got into with people I had to toss. It’s funny: cops come in and look at you and look at the guy on the ground, and if you’re a foot or so taller than the other guy, you’re in for it. And there are few people who aren’t smaller than me.

“There’s no way that that guy started a fight with you, no way,” a cop would tell me, when of course he had. You have to take into consideration that drunk people will do anything. They get their beer muscles and they pick a fight with the biggest guy in the place.

When that happens, it’s not my fault they end up lying on the ground.

I was working at a club near Fifth and K Streets—not Lulu’s—at a time when things were getting bad with gangs. We started bringing guns to work for protection, even though we weren’t licensed to carry them.

One night, there was a shooting out in the street. I ran out there with my friend Imani Lee. Things got hot and Imani started shooting. He wasn’t holding his gun in typical shooting stance. He had it tilted sideways, the way you see in movies, even though it’s absolutely the wrong way to fire.

I started laughing. Not very appropriate, but that’s what I did.

Fortunately, he didn’t hit anyone.

But one of our close friends ended up getting arrested that night. One of the gangbangers went up and told the cops that he had a gun. We had already told him to get rid of it, but he refused. Then the cops came over and he was patted down.

He spent months in a D.C. jail, which is a fucking brutal place.

SHOD FOOT

There was one other situation in particular I remember, probably the worst incident while I was bouncing. A couple of guys were beating up one of our bouncers outside the club where I was working. I came out and pretty much handed them both their asses. But then I went a little bit overboard. After I knocked them both to the ground, I kicked each one of them in the head. They ended up on the ground with their eyes rolling to the back of their heads.

Somebody called an ambulance and the police. I was shitting myself that one of them was going to die. I was arrested and charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, namely my feet. I believe the charge is officially called “assault: dangerous weapon (shod foot)”; it’s issued in cases where a person uses his or her foot in a shoe or a boot to kick or somehow injure someone. Your foot and boot are literally considered dangerous weapons, just like a knife or a gun or a baseball bat.

They ended up dropping the charges. I believe they did that once they interviewed everyone and found out that the guys had started with one of our bouncers and I was just coming to his rescue. In any event, the district attorney didn’t have a clear-cut case. But I think that the two guys did bring a civil suit against the bar. I’m not sure whether they won or got a settlement or what, but I do know I lost my job right after that.

CONVICTED OF ASSAULT

One other fight at Lulu’s got me into pretty serious trouble. In fact, it ended up with me going on trial for assault.

This frigging asshole was giving Marianne, one of our bartenders, a hard time. He was calling her a bitch and shit like that. I wouldn’t have liked that under any circumstances, but it just so happened that she was my girlfriend at the time. So I came up to him and said something to him along the lines of “Call her a bitch again and I’ll rip your head off.”

Well, he got smart with me, so I dragged him out through the club. I made sure his head met a couple of brick walls on the way out. It was one of those personal things, because he was giving my girlfriend a hard time. So I was a little rough on him and cut his head all up.

So. The police came. I was arrested. I went to court and lost. The jury found me guilty of misdemeanor assault. I was sentenced to probation for a year and began checking in with a probation officer. But the case was soon overturned. It had something to do with the way the judge had instructed the jury; I’m no lawyer, but I guess the appeals court thought the judge had somehow said the wrong thing and in effect directed the jury to find me guilty. Whatever it was, once it was overturned I wasn’t retried, and it was erased from my record.